Yossi Klein Halevi on the Nine Lives of Ehud Olmert

30.07.2008

Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert announced today that he will resign his post after his party elects a new leader in September. We asked TNR contributing editor Yossi Klein Halevi for his take from Jerusalem:

Is it really time for eulogies? Is the abyss known as the "Olmert era" closing? Ehud Olmert has been eulogized so often that, even now, after announcing his intention to resign as Israeli prime minister when the Kadima party holds primaries for a new leader in mid-September, some Israelis don't quite believe it. What's the catch, they wonder?

Like a parody of Jewish survival, Olmert has persisted, indestructible. The Lebanon fiasco of summer 2006 ended the careers of defense minister Amir Peretz and IDF chief of staff Dan Halutz, but Olmert lingered. So far, he has evaded a half-dozen police investigations. (Israeli joke: What do Olmert and the Torah have in common? Parshat hashavuah--a phrase that means the weekly Torah reading but could also mean the "scandal of the week.") He admitted to receiving cash in envelopes from New York fundraiser Morris Talansky, and Israeli newspapers have published copies of letters Olmert sent to prominent businessmen soliciting help for Talansky's business interests. But still the indictment tarried.

Then came the revelation that he may have subsidized family trips with funds stolen from the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum and from an organization for handicapped children--a scandal the press called "Olmert Tours." How, we wondered, could even he survive that one? But Olmert--portrayed in one newspaper caricature as a bandana-wearing contestant in the reality show "Survivor"--has continued to make life and death decisions for the Jewish state.

Olmert is the embodiment of what has been, for Israel, the year of scandal: a president accused of rape, a finance minister accused of massive embezzlement, a deputy prime minister found guilty of forcing his tongue into the mouth of a young woman soldier. Olmert, two years after assuming office and promising to make Israel a more "fun" place to live, leaves us a nation in shame. He went to war in Lebanon to restore our military deterrence and destroy Hezbollah's military capacity. Instead, he shattered Israeli self-confidence in our ability to defend ourselves, and empowered Hezbollah as the strongest force in Lebanese politics, with an arsenal three times larger than it possessed before Olmert's war.

Olmert is the first Israeli leader--perhaps the first democratic leader anywhere --to threaten his own country with destruction if it rejected his policies. Israel, he warned, is "finished" if it didn't withdraw from the West Bank. Yet in failing to defeat Hamas, he has insured the impossibility of a two-state solution for the foreseeable future, leaving us without a political or military option.

Perhaps Olmert's greatest offense was in debasing our public discourse with terms like "Talansky's envelopes" and "Olmert Tours," diverting our attention from the imminent nuclearization of Iran and the growing power of Hezbollah and Hamas. Instead of focusing on Israel's survival, we have been preoccupied with the melodrama of Olmert's survival.

Now comes the hard work of restoring sanity to Israeli politics. Neither of Kadima's leading candidates to replace Olmert--Foreign Minister Tzippi Livni and Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz--has the trust of the public. Livni is seen as honest but ineffectual, lacking minimal security credentials; Mofaz, though a former IDF chief of staff, is a lackluster politician with a credibility problem. (As a former Likud leader, he promised to remain in the Likud and immediately abandoned the then-sinking party for Kadima.)

Whoever wins in the Kadima primaries will almost certainly try to create a national unity government that will include the Likud. So far, though, the Likud is insisting it will remain in opposition until general elections are held. But that could abruptly change if Israeli military intelligence concludes that Iran is about to go nuclear--a threat whose neutralization requires the credibility of a unity government. The emergence of such a government will be the most telling sign that the country is beginning to heal itself from the tabloid scandals of the Olmert years and is now ready to restore Israeli deterrence by dealing with the Iranian crisis.

Yossi Klein Halevi is a contributing editor of The New Republic and a senior fellow at the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem.

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Posted: Wednesday, July 30, 2008 5:07 PM with 3 comment(s)

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Robert Powell said:

So, the question remains, HOW will Israel "deal with the Iranian crisis?".

A re-run of Lebanon, in which the air force fails miserably to achieve its objective, doesn't seem like a good idea. Unlike Lebanon, to attack Iran the Israelis will be required to cross hostile, or at least uncooperative airspace in order to face real anti-aircraft defenses in a heavily mountainous country much bigger than Iraq and much MUCH bigger than southern Lebanon, in which the targets have been hardened, buried, split up into penny-packets of mostly unknown locations, and surrounded by innocent civilians. Then, even if they manage to strike some of the targets, the likely result will be to increase Iranian determination to go nuclear, and of course initiate a war that will certainly be a catastrophe not only for Israel, but for the US troops in the Persian Gulf.

The idea that any likely Israeli leader would be so stupid is implausible.

July 31, 2008 1:43 AM

Soccer Dad said:

Judging from many of the reactions to PM Olmert's announcement that he would not run again to lead his party, Kadima, it would possible to say that he'd envy President Bush's level of popularity. Yossi Klein Halevi writes (h/t Shalem Center): Olmert is

July 31, 2008 7:39 AM

ponty said:

The resignation/theoretical of the repulsive Olmert is the equivalent of the mortgage crisis in America. It is an example of pure ego and exaggerated pride run rampant, examples of the worst behavior of private interest overriding public interest. Olmert is the cancer that has been eating Israel from within, the mentality that one creates their own reality seperate from the true reality. It is sad that no mention is made in the media about the evil done in the pursuit of the good life at any cost and at any price, the psychopathic insensitivity to the results of their greed and gluttony. No mention is made of the years and years of rich getting richer without producing anything of value, money making money with no conscience or greater good. The depravity of a society out of control, unregulated and lusting for power and pleasure deemed the highest good. We are only now feeling the effects of what amounts to a trillion dollars of wealth lost and wasted and with a threat of Islam and their oil wealth against this corrupt society, only God can save us, and not through prayer but out of pity. Olmert is an example of the worst qualities allowed to fester in Israel in its wish for a vacation from reality. But reality always cuts through the fog of the personality cult and self-worship. Olmert became a symbol fo all one aspires to, wealth and power and he was the new sacred cow of Israel. I hope Israel and America can recover from this satanic spell of money over public interest and responsibility and its devaluaing of the human and God for the temporary illusion of specialness and vanity.

July 31, 2008 8:20 AM